Settled down to watch Sky News at 9.00 this evening and was stunned by the live press conference they were covering regarding the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham. An independent report has just revealed something of the scale of this: 1400 victims at a conservative estimate from 1997 - 2013. Rotherham Borough Council had completely failed to deal with this, despite the evidence that was coming into them, as had their Child Protection officers and the police. These people, the Council I mean, were my last employers in the UK, for ten years in the decade before the abuse is said to have occurred.
And that makes me wonder if there was anything going on related to all this in those earlier years when I was teaching in Rotherham. If there were I didn't get a smell of it at my place of work and we dealt with a fair few kids in care. But were we being naïve? Or maybe the nefarious networks that need to develop for this kind of thing to take place on this kind of scale just weren't in place back then?
One thing I do know - the notion that somehow in these periods of 'historical' abuse systems to deal with this kind of thing didn't exist or there was a lack of awareness of what might happen with regard to teenagers, both boys and girls, being sexually exploited is nonsense. The sort of failure we're looking at here is unforgivable, and if it turns out that the horror stretches further back in time I'll be asking myself a few questions as to what I might have been able to know and do about it in my little corner of Rotherham.
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